Problem: I want to generate PDF directly instead of
having to go through dvips and distill.

Solution (John
Regehr): "pdflatex" produces nice, compact pdf directly from
latex, eliminating the need to go through dvips and distill. It also
gives you direct control over many pdf features that you can't get to
if you go through the longer toolchain.

Problem: A makefile would be nice.

Solution: Here's mine:
makefile. You can do "make ps" and
"make pdf". It should give you a starting point for something more
complicated. Be sure to change the file name from dft-spec to yours.

Problem: How can I transform LaTeX to HTML?

Solution (John
Regehr): There are a lot of tools out there. TeX4ht
seems to be one of the better ones. Get the LaTeX Web Companion for a
really good discussion of font issues with PDF, LaTeX to HTML
conversion, etc.